ABSTRACT
In nineteenth-century American culture, Africa, like African American women, was both hypervisible and invisible, inviting the penetrating gaze and a perfunctory glance. Africa was often imagined in oppositional terms: as a place of desuetude, menace, and wildness that burdened the orderly Christian West or as a lush, uncultivated, Edenic paradise relieved of civilization’s pretensions and contingencies. In their print productions and performances, however, nineteenth-century Black women imagined Africa in nuanced terms. My chapter develops how their notion of Africa and African identity telegraphed specific conditions of their lives as Black women, such as their relationships to African American family members and communities; their experiences as travelers and cosmopolitans; and their understanding of themselves as intellectuals and educators. I will discuss such Black women authors as Gertrude Bustill Mossell and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31) is a call for these writers to revisit and complicate Africa’s meanings.
